Books by Lamb

Summary: The book was a breakthrough. It introduced plant availability performance for the first time and its component reliability and maintainability. More importantly, it introduced and described all maintenance and reliability practices and their relationship to plant availability performance through reliability and maintainability. Until the book was written, the practices were limited to and practiced by the defense, and aerospace industries.

With time, many of the practices from defense and aerospace were adopted as “world-class or best-practice” for industry and a large number of maintenance and reliability experts has grown up around them. Therefore, it is important that the book offers a comprehensive, systems-based explanation of all practices. This is because some have fallen off the radar, causing them to be overlooked in maintenance excellence initiatives.

The second relevant breakthrough characteristic of the book is that it is structured upon describing how the complete system of practices for plant availability performance, are engaged through the lifecycle stages of conceptual, basic and detailed design, implementation and business operations. As it does, the book explains the what and the why of each practice and then defines and flowcharts the steps to implement it.

Award: Received the 1995 Society of Logistic Engineers Armitage Medal for Outstanding Contributions to Logistics Literature.

Summary: This “how-to” book explains for the first time what is required to bring maintenance to be a full player in a firm’s business success. This is in contrast to continuing to regard maintenance as a “necessary evil” to be managed efficiently as possible and as some professionals say, "It's like pushing a rope."

Eleven business disciplines must be engaged to realize the long-standing vision for maintenance to become part of business success. By comparison, the well known maintenance and reliability best practices span five of the eleven. The six missing disciplines span strategic planning, finance and accounting, budgeting, variance reporting and forecasting, audit and control, and ERP-type technologies. The book explains the principles of each and how to apply them to changing the firm’s income statement, balance sheet, statement of cash flow and returns.

All business initiatives run a high risk of not generating their promised returns. To overcome the risk, the book also introduces a departure from the traditional project management approach. The approach executes returns by working back from targeted slices of returns through interface measures to the organizational abilities that, when in place, will begin to measurably and reportably generate and sustain the returns.